Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Willy Tarreau
2005-12-05T11:38:04Z

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 11:55:36AM +0100, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
> On 2005-12-05T07:26:09, Willy Tarreau <willy@w.ods.org> wrote:
>
> > What I think should be done is to still maintain older 2.6
> > (eg: 2, 3 or 4 previous releases) so that people will have
> > the time to switch to a new one. And I think that what Adrian
> > wants to do would be useful *only* if he proceeds that way.
> >
> > Maybe you should just join forces, eg Chris and you to catch
> > new patches, and Adrian to merge them to older kernels ? Every
> > software maker always supports a few older releases for the
> > people who need to stay on something stable, and it is clearly
> > what is missing now in 2.6.
>
> Well, this is probably the most useful suggestion so far. The kernel is
> free land; if you or someone else wants to maintain the upcoming 2.6.16
> "forever", and backport fixes or selected features, by all means, do it.
> Define your policy, set up a tree, and off you go.
>
> If Adrian will maintain it, it'll for sure be the most static kernel
> ever.
>
> This won't impact the Linux kernel, which will just continue to run its
> course. The kernel process as a whole doesn't need to change; just
> someone needs to do the grunt work.
>
> If your kernel is wildly successful and adopted by users as well as
> distributions, you'll be very happy and tell us 'told ya so!'. If not,
> no harm will be done either, and you'll have the kernel you want for
> your own purposes.
>
> Be aware however that this is a very painful job. Trust me, I've been
> involved with the receiving end of maintaining such a kernel for SLES
> for a couple of releases. ;-)
>
> Which is exactly the point: it's so painful that for this, people want
> to be paid, and don't like doing it in their spare time. You may
> maintain it for 6 months, sure, which will be less painful than
> maintaining it for 5, 7 years, but when you rebase, you'll still put
> your users into the dependency hell, and they won't have tested the
> intermediate releases... Ouch. Not to mention that not every backported
> fix is trivial to do.
>
> Anyway, good luck to you.
>
> The current 2.6.x.y-stable series is quite sane, because they are
> essentially just fixing very critical bugs in very recent kernels, with
> little back porting effort.

I agree it is sane. The problem is that it does not exist for long enough.
When you have 2.6.14.X working perfectly and you need a fix for a newly
discovered security fix which only exists in 2.6.15.Y, then you have to
leave 2.6.14 and enter 2.6.15. That is the problem, because for just a
fix, you change megabytes of source code which will bring their equivalent
in bugs.

Regards,
willy